Finding Articles for Social Sciences & Humanities

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This interactive tutorial will help you find quality sources for your assignment using a search strategy for three separate databases (the library's search bar, JSTOR, and Google Scholar).

What is your name?

1. Describe what you're researching. What are you trying to find information about?

When doing research in the social sciences or humanities, you will likely find a mixture of popular and scholarly (also known as peer-reviewed) sources. Depending on your assignment requirements, both might be useful. It's helpful to understand the characteristics of each:

Brainstorming Keywords on Your Topic

Before we get searching, consider the various possible keywords you could use as your search words.
Here's why:

1. Computers don't know that a word like "salary" means about the same thing as "earnings, wages, or pay", so it's important to think of terms that mean the same thing.

2. The terms that you naturally think of when you think about your topic may not be the same words that experts use to write about the topic.

You can identify other keywords by looking for a Wikipedia entry on your topic or simply doing a Google search on your topic and seeing what related or synonymous words are used in the titles of results. Try to think of as many synonyms or related terms as you can.

Here's an example of how to get keywords from your topic

2. Now brainstorm keywords for your topic and list them here.

Once you have your keywords, you can start searching. Using connecting words (AND, OR, and NOT) will help you develop a targeted search and save time. This three-minute video from Gumberg Library at Duquesne University will also introduce ways to develop your search using phrases in quotes, truncation, and wildcards.

Using the library search bar to find articles

The library search bar on the front page of the library website searches many of the library databases, books, videos, and journal subscriptions. When you select the "articles" tab, you search not just scholarly articles, but also magazine and newspaper articles written for a non-expert audience. Before you search, be sure to click on the Articles tab, or you'll find yourself searching for books and videos.

If you want to limit your search there to just scholarly articles, you can check the box for Peer Reviewed on the left side of the page (shown below).

Now you're ready to start searching on your own in the library search bar.

If your assignment requires you to use scholarly sources, be sure to check the box that limits your search to scholarly peer-reviewed articles. If not, you can just enter your keywords into the library search bar from https://library.assumption.edu and click Search.

Try different combinations of keywords and see how they change your results list. When you find articles that look useful, email them to yourself so you'll have the article as well as the formatted citation without having to go back into the database again.

3. Keywords you used that were successful:

4. Find at least one article that looks useful for your research project. Click on its title and then click on the "Cite" icon on the page. Copy the citation in MLA or APA format (or whatever your instructor requires) and paste it in here.

This tutorial is adapted with permission from the Portland Community College Library. https://www.pcc.edu/library/information-literacy-teaching-materials/

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